Science magazine has published a blistering critique of the most sacred cow of scientific research, namely the peer review quality system. Unfortunately, Science doesn't seem to have understood its own findings. It proclaims to have run a sting operation, written by 'gonzo scientist' John Bohannon, revealing the weaknesses of the relatively new publishing model we call open access. In fact, the Science article shows exactly the opposite of what it intended, namely that we need an even wider use of open access than the one we currently have.

What is open access publishing?

At its core, open access is about making the results of research freely available to anyone. Obviously, the internet is at the heart of this revolution. But it's also driven by idealism and principle.

Consider the flow of money for research at a publicly funded institution. A national government or a research council gives funds to a university that ultimately passes these monies along to a researcher. The researcher makes a discovery and writes an article about it. The article is then submitted to a journal. The journal is responsible for rigorously studying the reported work to make sure it is reliable. This is the heart of quality control: peers – experts working in the same field – anonymously review the work; they challenge it, critique it, ask for new perspectives to be considered, and may even suggest changes in the analysis and presentation.

What are the journals' costs?

There is of course variation, but the simplest model is this. Journals pay the authors of an article nothing. They pay the editor of a journal nothing. They pay the three or more reviewers of articles nothing. Some journals incur expenses associated with typesetting and related activities. And of course those that publish on paper have costs associated with printing and distribution.

Publishers then sell the journals to – you've guessed it – universities. They sell them to the very institutions that have given so much to the publisher already: research papers and the costs behind them as the time of researchers, editors and reviewers. All this – and the copyright to the article – are freely donated to the publisher.

Even though the costs are limited, the price of journals has exploded. Harvard, the richest university in the world, says it can't keep up and has started cutting subscriptions. This is happening everywhere. The publishers respond by packaging journals in massive bundles and no longer allowing universities to take only the ones they want. It's become ugly.

One of the very biggest, Elsevier, consistently reports hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. Much of this profit comes from public expenditure to buy access to articles that have been produced with public funds. This is the context that recently led to a worldwide boycott of Elsevier by researchers around the globe. And it's the context in which an entire industry – scholarly publishing – has become ripe for innovation. Open access is the result.

When bad science gets published

The peer review system is taken very seriously by scholars. But most researchers struggle to meet the expectations that their institutions and fields place on them in the course of a normal working week. And sometimes, bad work slips by and gets published.

The spectacular case of Diederik Stapel showed that a researcher could fabricate data for years without being caught. A massive review concluded that Stapel published 55 articles based on fraudulent data in serious journals – even in Science. Science naturally followed the standards of good practice and retracted the article. Is it reasonable to expect that the peer review process would catch such fraud? The committee reviewing the case found it "inconceivable that … reviewers of the international 'leading journals' … could have failed to see that [Stapel's experiments] would have been almost infeasible in practice, and did not notice the reporting of impossible statistical results."

Bad work gets published. This is a crisis for science and it's the crisis that Science shines a sharp light on this week. But Science misread the cause, which was not about making the results of research freely available via open access, but the meltdown of the peer review system. We need change. It's the digital age that allows that change, and the very best open access journals that are leading the development of new approaches to peer review.

Corruption

Where research is made freely available through open access publishing, there may still be legitimate expenses that a publisher needs to recoup. One strategy for this is to take payment from the author when an article is accepted for publication. It is now common for research councils to allow grant money to be used to pay these so-called author fees.

This is a model that invites corruption. Set up a journal, accept some articles, charge a high fee, and publish the article on your website. This corruption is fed, of course, by the fact that researchers feel incredible pressure to publish more and more. It's also fed by a system that uses quantity as a proxy for quality. But it is a mistake to equate open access and author payment. There are traditional journals that require some payment, too, especially in connection with high typesetting costs.

The Science article refers to a database called the Directory of Open Access Journals. Of the open access journals listed in the directory, 65% do not charge authors to publish but are funded instead by universities directly or by research councils or professional societies.

In Norway, where I work, there is a national committee charged with sorting out bad journals – open access and traditional alike. And, yes, because of author payment, that committee sees a proliferation of illegitimate open access journals. But, again, that is because of author payment, not because the results of research are being made freely available.

Quality control and peer review

The real problem for science today is quality control. Peer review has been at the heart of this, but there are too many failures – both in open access and traditional journals – simply to plod ahead with the same system. We need new approaches and numerous individuals and organisations are working on these, such as the open evaluation project.

The creative potential offered by digital communication of scientific results, an area in which open access journals are leading the way, is exactly where we need to focus. And if we do so, we will solve the problem of the broken peer review system that Science and the gonzo scientist have uncovered.

Curt Rice is a professor at the University of Tromsø and a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study – follow him on Twitter @curtrice

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